


Sell Me, Sell You

by 3amepiphany



Series: The Boutique AU [3]
Category: Wander Over Yonder
Genre: M/M, Multi, The Boutique AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-23 21:04:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6130019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3amepiphany/pseuds/3amepiphany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Case of the Mondays carries through to the Boutique at evening shift change. Peepers finishes his turnaround with a new title twice over. He'd better update that resume.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sell Me, Sell You

Jeff sat down at his desk in the back and wiped at his brow. Peepers opened the mini fridge in the corner and grabbed them each a soda. “Having inventory and repricing done already will probably be the best saving grace, here, I think, Peeps. Thanks to you and Syl for handling that. I know we’re shorthanded right now but you two really pulled it together.”

“Honestly, after last year, it was sort of necessary.”

“That’s a little mean, but I’ll agree with it nonetheless.”

“He’s supposed to be back today, right?” Peepers sat down on the floor and stretched his legs out, enjoying the cold drink and the moment’s rest from moving around what must have been a metric ton of silicone appendages alone, forget the rest of the stock. His back hurt. He really regretted not bringing one or two of the dollies from the studio to use for the day and made a mental note to suggest it for the next huge delivery. He also regretted telling Jeff three weeks ago that he wouldn’t mind covering an extra day’s vacation time for Brad.

“I believe so,” the shop’s owner had taken off his ratty old cardigan to get the brunt of the work done, but he reached around to it and pulled his phone out of one of its pockets. “How do you think he’s gonna feel if I ask him to do the invoices?”

Peepers shook his head, already imagining the reaction. First indignance, but the hesitant agreement to do it, then the attempt to pawn it off on Ryder, then the bribing of Peepers to get it done, then the sad acceptance followed by the complaining during the completion of the task.

The guy had learned quickly that Sylvia was nice enough to help but not to be taken advantage of.

"You never finished telling me about this date you said you went on. Is she cute? Smart? Does she know you work here?"

"Uhm, well, they're a he." The soda was refreshing, but he was really craving a coffee.

Jeff laughed. "Well, the questions still stand."

"Yes, yes, and yes. You've met." And at this, the proprietor settled back in his chair, a pensive look on his face as he did the math. Peepers waited quietly, worrying that the first guess was going to be Awesome, and that he'd have to remind Jeff that he wouldn't make that same mistake a fourth time. Then he shuddered inwardly and thought about the first two times he'd made such a claim. He set his can aside and idly reached down to open a box of what looked like underwear. He unwrapped the packing material and pulled out a pair, and found that they were a style of harness. "This is cool, who was selling these?"

"Some start-up out by Frivulon H. It's not Ryder. You said smart."

"No, wow. I'm gonna tell him you said that." He carefully examined the tag on the item, the extra o-rings attached to that, and its construction; noting the stitching and the stretch of the fabric.

"He'll be touched, honestly. A comment like that from me? Cherished. It's not one of our regulars, is it? Maybe that one gentleman who studies the dead languages."

Peepers said it wasn't, and then remembered he needed to ask Sylvia if that patron had come in over the weekend when she was working his shift. She was no stranger to the weird videos the guy would share with her when he came in for his reading material, but the real fun was that they were never the same video twice and usually not something one might ever find themselves looking for. The last ones the customer brought in were a video of a metal lathe making chess pieces and a wooden box maker creating intricate designs out of lacquered scraps and then shaving them thinner than paper.

The guy was very funny but he had a bite of cynicism that was too much like his own, and said as much. Frankly he was waiting for the opportunity to get the poor dude out of food service and offer him a job there at the shop. They needed someone like a linguist for off-planet orders and the odd tourist.

"It's not you and Hater, is it?"

"Holy sneb, Jeff, what?"

"So no."

"No, grop, no, no. I'm done with--" he stopped himself. "Oh, that would have been a lie."

"So yes?"

"No, it's still no. Not Hater. There are several reasons why it would never be Hater. But I was just about to stupidly say that I'd never date another musician, but then I realized I couldn't. He is a musician. He's written a book, too, and has a day job. A serious adult day job." The harness was folded back up and placed back in the box to be counted later on during the next shift. A lot of things flooded back for him and he suddenly felt very heavy, allowing himself to sort of melt back into his seat while Jeff leaned forward in his own.

"Is he tall?"

"Why is this a thing?"

"I'm just curious."

"Everyone is just curious. No, not very. And it's okay, I'm okay with that. It makes the conversation come easier. My neck doesn't hurt as much. Look, you might not be able to guess, should I just tell you?"

Jeff waved his hand, shaking his head. "If he happens to come around while I'm here, you can point him out to me. That's assuming you're going another round or few with him?"

"I hope so. It's up to him. We had a fun night but I'm kind of worried that it was a little crazier than he's used to."

The bell over the door rang and Peepers checked the time on his cell phone as he got up, letting Jeff rest and finish some more of his soda. But it wasn't a customer, it was Brad, back from vacation. And he sure looked it. Or perhaps he was hungover. Or still drunk. Either way he looked like hell took a headlong dive into a medieval renaissance fair costume trunk and Peepers wondered if he should ask how the trip went.

He didn't need to.

"When I got that invite in the mail I considered burning it and I really should have. The next time I get anything like that I want to you do the decent thing and remind me about this last week home. I missed a very important SCA event this weekend and it could cost me points towards my lordship." He went on like this in a dramatic way for a bit as he settled in, hanging his scarf up and putting his sword and his duffel full of costuming gear in the back, waving to Jeff, checking some videos back into stock and logging it in the employee binder, and then surveying the mountains of boxes of new merchandise.

Peepers sat back down to finish his soda, and Jeff tapped a stack of invoices on the desk to straighten them out as he asked, "Now that you're back, do you feel a lot better looking in on the past and seeing how much further you've come away from it?"

"Demurra is married with children now."

"Oh," said Peepers, quietly.

"She married the asshole that used to make fun of me for the role-playing back then. Scaly jerkface."

"Oh, shit."

"On the other hand I ran into a good friend of mine I haven't seen since they ditched graduation. They're an assassin now. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I mean, surprised, sure, because how many carnivorous plants go on to careers like that?"

"Well," said Jeff, holding out the sheaf of papers. "Welcome back, welcome home. If you need to talk about it, I'm here. Also, I know it's Monday, but do you have to wear your game garb in the shop? Can't you change back here and wear some normal clothes for your shift?" He slipped a pen back into the pocket of his own loud, tropical print shirt. Brad balked, and tried to turn the conversation around to scheduling Ryder on Mondays instead, as Ryder didn't have battle fortifications to approve of or bears to fight without time to grab dinner after clocking out, but eventually he retreated out to the front counter, cape swishing behind him, to do the work and watch the door.

After a while, the phone rang and Brad ignored it pointedly. Peepers came out in a rush and picked up the receiver instead, with a small sigh. “Hole in the Wall, no toy too big or too small, Peepers speaking.”

“I want to tour with the Harbingers. Shared billing.”

He leaned against the counter, curious to know why Dom was calling him at the store number. She had his mobile. Or had it at one point. He knew he had hers, but it had been ages since he had dialed it. Grop, that last time he did actually call her up was a weird one. “Now that’s a hell of a request. I’m currently unavailable to chat about something of that magnitude… But please. Have your people call me, and I’ll be happy to discuss the terms of this unholy union when I’m not up to my eyeball in flavored condoms.”

The door to the shop opened, the little bell ringing roughly. “I got rid of my people before the last tour,” she said, hanging up on him as she spoke, the neon lights from the signage reflecting wildly off of her sunglasses and coloring her hair pink and orange, and blinking red. Dom strolled right past the magazines, the dvds and the leather strappings, and grabbed a display dildo off the far shelving that was about the size of her own arm. She wielded it about like a two-handed sword as she approached the counter, and pointed it at Brad. The end flopped about for a moment before drooping with its own weight. “Kneel, gallant sir, so you may be knighted!” she exclaimed, grinning madly. “What’s your name?”

“Please don’t molest the merchandise,” he said, deadpanned, stamping an invoice.

She bobbed her head in Peepers’ direction, and asked, “What’s his name?”

“Starlight. Brad Starlight.”

“On the order of Lord Domana the Dominator’s… dominion,” she chuckled to herself, “I hereby dub thee Sir Bradical Starlight, High Knight of Dildoton.”

Brad rolled his eyes and stamped another invoice. “It’s Bradley.”

Peepers put the phone receiver back in its cradle and asked, “Did you leave your label or what?” He watched her set the dildo down, its suction cup bottom making a thick sound against the Formica and its top wiggling for a peculiarly long moment before leaning down to wiggle in Brad’s face. He was not moved.

She took her shades off and hung them from the collar of her faded and holey “Bluxon Rift cup stacking champion” shirt, looking around the store with an odd expression. The makeup around her eyes was smudgy and pretentiously sloven as usual; as black as her attitude, too. She frowned. “I remember it being darker in here. A lot more skeezy. And did you guys get rid of the video booths or did you ever have those? I might be remembering things wrong.”

“We had video booths?” Brad said cautiously, the sudden look on his face of the horror going through his mind as he was undoubtedly imagining what it would be like to staff video viewing booths.

“We never had video booths,” Peepers assured them.

“Oh,” they both said to him at once.

“It was darker, though, for sure. Jeff decided to lighten the place up a bit.” 

Brad stamped another invoice and set it aside to be hole-punched later. He cleared his throat to say, "You'd be a Lady, not a Lord."

"I'm a Lord. Not a Lady. Nice tiara," Dom said. She reached out to touch it and he leaned away.

"Please don't, it's hand-made. And it's a Circlet of Aural Protection, not a tiara."

She mouthed out a silent "Oh," and rolled up the sleeves of her flannel overshirt. Peepers stared up at her, blinking slowly, waiting.

"Let me level with you," she said, looking away at some of the corsets hanging on the far wall. "I'm mad as flarp at him. I really am. But that's a personal matter. I'm here on business first and foremost, and once that's handled then I'll handle the personal stuff. I know you have studio time coming up and I know he has material ready to go. So do I. What I want to do is pitch a collaboration and bank on it. Take it to tour. Bank on that."

"You want me to mediate this again."

She rolled her eyes and slumped a bit, in a pouty sort of way. "Peepers, I need your help, sure, but don't for one second think that I'm going to just toss you in the middle of that sort of war zone again."

"I'll be there regardless of whether I'm tossed there or led there gently by a group of singing seraphs granting me one last happiness before my death. This is Hater we're talking about. Not just my best friend but my client and my roommate, and trust me when I say I don't think this is going to end any better than last time. It might even end worse."

"I'll do it. Just like I did at the show. Offer to sit down with him and have some drinks, see if we can fix things up enough to get the ball rolling. But I need you to help. Just like last time, only now I'm not fighting it." She smiled and grabbed a bottle of lubricant off of the end shelf next to her, rolling it around in her hands a bit before setting it down on the counter next to the giant toy. "Butter him up for me. Warm him back up to the idea of me and I'll take care of the rest."

"Dom... I'll talk to him. But honestly as angry as he was when Awesome told us you were booked, I don't know. He's not entirely great with this sort of stuff. He never has been."

"He's stubborn. But I'm better at it. At least think about it. At least get him thinking about it." She looked at Brad and asked if there were any condoms big enough to cover the monstrosity wiggling away on the counter.

He paused for a moment in his stamping, and then shrugged, turned around on the stool and grabbed a pack off of the wall. "The largest size you can get at any store would be enough for this. You might want to go with a different lube, though. This would be fantastic with steel or glass but not for use with silicone or condoms." She made a gesture to the display and he reached for a different brand.

"Do you... carry glass or steel?"

"Mm," Peepers interrupted, and leaned back through the beaded curtain into the back room. "Jeff, you didn't happen to bring in a new supplier for the borosilicate stuff, did you?"

"No, I haven't. Mostly they're selling the same bulk stuff everyone is now, all the good and fun things you find online, with all those talented people selling there on those DIY craft sites instead, now." The curtain made a soft sound as Jeff came out to see why the question was being asked. He grinned and waved. "Speaking of talented people, hello, Dom. A surprise seeing you. It's been a while. Uh, oh, no offense meant in the matter, it's just how it is."

She shook her head and leaned against the counter. "None taken."

"But, uh, you...?"

"Oh. It's been a while since I've done any glasswork. That priority matter is still a priority. Accolades and touring, all that. It's going pretty well."

Jeff shrugged. "It was a niche you filled incredibly well, pun intended."

She laughed.

Suddenly, Peepers had an idea. "How rusty would you say you were at blowing glass?" he asked her. Dom looked at him, silently, that default little smirk on her face. "Say if you had some downtime in between now and promoting a tour? It's just.. what if you branched out with your marketing? I'm not trying to step on the toes of anyone you might have just gotten rid of. But a line of toys. Designed by you."

"Follow in the lame footsteps of someone like Bommy Lee of Mottled Crew? Show up in some gag gift shop with my logo on edible undies like Smooch? Peepers, you've got two left feet."

"No, no, they wouldn't have to be mass-produced; in fact I think it'd be much better if they weren't. You were still making something like thirty a week when you were just doing small order fulfillment for Jeff. Jeff, Grab me that pair of shorts I was looking at earlier, would you?"

Dom looked at Jeff now as he ducked back behind the beads, her eyes narrowing a bit. Peepers could see that she was already trying to figure out how to twist this over to her advantage, so that she was calling the shots. 

But he wasn't about to let her. He caught the shorts as they were tossed to him, and he held them out, showing her that they were actually a harness, and saying, "I mean, just about all of your fans know about your hobby, a lot of your older work still sells online for a lot, Roving Stone just did a blurb on an online auction last month. If they were limited, functional art pieces, something that you could only get through Hole in the Wall or our website, or another auction, imagine the effortless promotional work that could get you. Imagine the easy attention. The collaborative offers you wouldn’t even have to ask for."

"Hater is going to be so pissed off with you," she said quietly, reaching for the garment and looking closely at the o-rings and then looking around the shop again. "I'm pretty pissed off at you, but that's because this is too good for me to pass up."

"I'll talk to him about it. Like. Really, really talk to him about it."

"He's going to murder you in your sleep."

"Probably."

"Let me figure out what needs to be done on my end of the line, but you and I will have to get together when you're free, soon. I'll want a copy of your resume too, if you’ve got an updated one. Sir Starlette," she said sternly, ignoring Peepers’ confused comment about the resume, putting down the shorts and pointing at the bottles and the toy, "ring me up for these and one of those sparkly pink things on that second shelf there behind you."

With his cape catching on things, Brad sort of slid off of his chair to go retrieve a boxed version of the big dildo bouncing away idly on the counter. Peepers grabbed it and un-suctioned it with a loud "POCK", comically carrying it overhead to put it back on the display.

"How's your date doing?"

He laid the toy back down on its side so it would sit still and not destroy everything and came back around to grab a binder from behind the counter. "Oh, he's alright."

"He doesn't look much like a fighter, that was sort of a surprise." She pulled out her wallet and Jeff stepped forward with a gesture of his hand and started ringing up the purchase, no doubt with the intent of comping it entirely. Peepers stifled a remark about that and the inventory numbers, flipping quietly through the plastic trading card pages full of vendors' business cards before finding her old one close to the back. He pulled it out and handed it to her so that she could verify the information was still correct. "Is he sticking around after all of that?"

"I see him again this weekend. It's his turn to show me a wild time."

"Thank him again for defending my honor," Dom said, giving the card back with a thumbs-up and then taking the receipt offered to her by Jeff. Brad came back out with the box. "Sir Stardate could stand to learn some chivalry from that guy."

"What guy?"

"This guy I saw over the weekend," Peepers answered simply.

Brad sneered. It didn't go unnoticed, and Dom called him out on it. "Spoiler alert, the Commander is bi."

"He's not knighted. And if he were a Knight would technically rank higher than a Commander," he replied only, bagging her items up.

"Not in the Order of Domana. I dub thee, Commander Orb," she spat, taking the pink sparkly thing from Brad’s hands, the plastic around it crinkling softly, and thwacking Peepers with it on each of his shoulders. Neither he nor Brad had any idea of how to react to that. Jeff started laughing. She put the toy in the bag, put on her sunglasses, and stuck her tongue out between her teeth at Brad as she turned and left, her hips demanding attention and the bell ringing her off through the door.

"It'll be good to have glass back in the shop again," Jeff finally managed to say after a few quiet moments.

“She’s really scary. Like. Really, really scary. I don’t know how you talk to her like that. It’s like putting your head in the mouth of a dragon and asking it not to make a meal out of you. Or a snack, in your case.”

“Is that what you did at your reunion, Sir Stardick?”

Stymied at that, Brad went back to sorting and stamping invoices, and Peepers turned to Jeff, who was pulling the box of apparel hanger hooks out from under the back end of the counter storage.

“She asked for my resume. Did I just get hired on as her manager or something, because that’s… I don’t know how that’s going to work. I have my hands full with Hater as it is.”

Captain Tim welcomed him home loudly as he walked through the door to the apartment, hissing and snarling and tangling herself up between his legs. "Honestly, all you seem to want to do is kill me, don't stop in front of me, please, go, go," he muttered to her as he struggled to get inside without spilling his coffee or dropping his helmet. "Hater," he called out.

There was a grumble from the couch, where Hater was playing Super Meatcraft on the television. On the stained and painted and stickered coffee table was the usual stack of yellow legal pads and the usual mess of pens, several of them snapped in half and stuck into the usual red solo cup labeled "BROKEN". Miraculously most of the ink from these pens had made it into the cup, too, with minimal mess. Tim jumped up onto the couch, and Hater lifted the controller so she wouldn't be stepping on any of the buttons as she ran back and forth across his lap. Peepers sat down, not bothering to take his jacket off.

"Productive day?" he asked.

"I wrote a song about tearing out Dom's guts and eating them."

"Okay."

"Because I really want her inside me. Like, dead, inside me. Also I want her dead."

"........Okay. That's a little gruesome, but okay. Kind of serial-killer-ish."

"It's a ballad," Hater said, the little character on his screen putting down another brick and jumping up and down the side of the building that was being made. Captain Tim settled down against Peepers with a heavy sigh, and started cleaning her front legs. “I’m probably not going to use it on the album because it’s way too tender of a song.”

Peepers rubbed at his eye a bit. “Is it? Man, I can imagine what that would be like, if you two went on tour together or something, and that was your number one single off the album.” He stopped for a moment, realizing that he totally bypassed the script he was practicing on the ride home and then muttering “Oh, grop,” to himself.

Hater paused the game. “Us? Tour together? Peepers, I know your sleep schedule’s messed up, but dag.”

“Hah, yeah. Good joke, right?” he laughed uneasily, petting Captain Tim gently so she wouldn’t bite him.

“...Do you think she’d be interested if she was asked?”

“From a business standpoint, she might. You two are both charging right into recording new stuff and it would make amazing sense, but… I’d have to talk to her people about it.”

“I called the song ‘Blood-Tint My World’.”

“That’s…. I’m not mentioning the song to her. You can do that. That’s all you, buddy. You were just screaming this weekend about how you didn’t want to share a stage with her and now you’re thinking about eating her insides.” He kicked his feet up on the table and asked for the other controller. “Your meat rations are low, let me go farm and blow up some livestock while you finish that.”

As he logged into his account and got his little character into the game, he re-evaluated his recent life choices, and started reframing the conversation now that the idea was on the table.


End file.
